Mandatory privacy > Optional privacy

Optional privacy is a trap.
Zcash lets you choose public or hidden. Most people choose public. Some Zcash users still call the whole thing “shielded money”. It is not. Only the people who bother to use the hidden option get privacy(and not always).
The rest of the chain is open like Bitcoin. Edward Snowden helped start Zcash. He said privacy should happen by itself, not as a choice you have to remember.

When privacy is optional the chain still has public doors. Money goes in public. May sit in the shielded pool. Comes out public.
The amounts and the timing on the public side can be matched even when the shielded pool itself is solid. This is pass-through linkage. Amount-matching. The pool hid the path inside. It did not hide the link between the public in and the public out.

Look at last week. Ledger/CryptoBilis theft. Over a hundred million gone. Funds moved through Tornado Cash into Zcash’s shielded pool and then out. YFarmX matched 108 of 108 exits to their specific lots down to the zatoshi because the transparent amounts acted as a unique fingerprint. The hiding math worked in the middle. The public edges still leaked. The hacker was completely deanonymized.

When privacy is optional most activity stays transparent. The effective anonymity set shrinks. Users or services accidentally or intentionally leave trails via transparent pool addresses.

ZKas hides every payment. There is no public choice. The chain forces it. Mandatory shielded design removes the transparent boundary on the chain itself. There is no public “in” or “out” amount to match. Every transaction is private by default. The whole network contributes to the anonymity set. Users cannot opt out or shrink it.

ZKas inherited Kaspa’s BlockDAG. Many blocks can be made at the same time. That is why blocks come every second. The hiding math (Orchard, same strong math Zcash uses) was added on top of this fast system so it does not slow it down. Combined with modern zk proofs the goal is private money where the privacy is not a feature you turn on, but the default state of the chain.

• Zcash: Strong math, but you have to choose it. Most do not. Slow. Leaks at the doors.
• Monero: uses mixing for privacy(breakable in theory). Slower.
• ZKas: Always hidden. Fast (1 second). Uses the strongest math encryption.

Zcash is the biggest example of “optional privacy” system and it doesn’t work. Now imagine what’s happening inside even smaller anonymity set “optional privacy” systems.

Mandatory privacy > Optional privacy
Optional privacy < Mandatory privacy
ZKas is new and fully open source. Visit https://zkas.info to explore ZKas.